This thread aims, as fans of rF2, to define what are the characteristics that each of us would like to see in rF2 in 2020 (2020 therefore quickly).

Knowing that each of us has different wishes and preferences (hence the interest to discuss them here).

In fact, the question would be :

What will make rF2 still your favorite central sim in a few months (max end of 2020) and what will make you like it more.

I asked myself this question personally, and here is the result :

1) The physical engine is the major asset of rF2 (IMO).

I want a "guarantee" that the physical engine will improve regularly (+ strongly better rain physics).

2)Car content is one of the main assets of rF2 IMO (physics).

I hope that this continues, with a relative acceleration of creations.
I want an ultra complete category to make beautiful grids or all the main categories of endurance, but for the rest as much diversity as possible.

3) AI and rules and everything so that the offline experience is pleasant.

From this point of view, rF2 is incredibly bad.
The multiplayer experience for those who are not in a league is catastrophic, but I don't care about that personally.

4) Graphic performance, in particular VR.

On the one hand the performance can probably be improved considerably, but rather than improving the graphic quality, if you have an increased performance, you can increase the image quality and increase the graphic parameters.
Besides, for endurance we should all be able to configure rF2 for the worst game circumstances (rain, clouds, 61 AI, sunset/sunrise/night, timescale etc.).

5) Loading time......

Yes, there has been a marked improvement, but the loading times are ridiculous compared to all the other games.

6) UI and features.

The current UI is (sorry) catastrophic (the new one). At any point of view.

In VR there are a lot of problems and freeze.
The weather settings have not even been improved !
In short, it is not my priority, but it becomes urgent to make it correct.

If all these points improve significantly, rF2 will be incredibly good for me.

Of course I wish for other things, but this is the most urgent IMO.

Do not hesitate to do the same and say what is essential for you to make rF2 attractive!

More car components. There are plenty of systems in race cars that are not available in rF2. Just for example the wheelspin lights.
I've never used iRacing, but I get the impression the garage setups have many many more options to adjust. I would like to see rF2 expand our garage adjustments.

For the most part I'm pretty satisfied with the way it is although everyone has their differences.

Like any sim, (including stress, circuit, thermal etc.) it has its quirks and its up to the user to find a workaround solution, but overall pretty good.

That said, I think a fundamental weakness is that its a bit less online friendly than it could be.
With rFactor1 there was a Lobby that enabled communication. One could also see who was online.

We can see what tracks are running, but have no clue which mods are on the track. With Steam hosting mods it seems that the Steam content mods (tracks & cars) could be isolated/filtered to select a server that is both public and mod download enabled.

Leaderboard data for multiplayer servers would be nice to see as would a web interface. There are a handful of these on external websites like ISR (thanks Corti!) but seems to be no "factory standards" on this. Seems like something like that could become an optional extension from S397 for an added revenue stream. It could serve to separate the ad-hoc leagues from the dedicated leagues, both of which have their place.

Being somewhat of a casual simracer I spend most of my time just taking laps in various cars and tuning them. Not too big with online racing but occasionally I'll jump on a server. Running a dedicated league takes quite an effort. I did that about ten years ago with rFactor1 and it was great fun, a great group of members. Time consuming as it took about 15 hours a week just to maintain the website and another 80+ hours just to set up the league files. I doubt I'll ever do that again particularly with as difficult as it has become compared to rFactor1.

Maybe that just my own thoughts, but thats what the OP was looking for.

- Make actual use of the advanced physics engine by involving more real drivers and switching another gear in the physics development.
ACC at the moment is pulling away and showing how its done, with GT3 cars at least. Sure rF2 doesnt have blatant exploits and fundemental physics skews like iRacing, but it is also lacking in fidelity advancements for years.

- Switch focus from producing content and artwork to perfecting the platform stability. Modern UI is irrelevant if the back-end is a steaming pile of slippery spaghetti. If the leaderboards & endurance races had some stability and users could plug-and-play instead of spending years on ironing out stutters and digging in player.json to find fps limits and other optimizing settings, then the experience and popularity could be greatly increased.
Here, Raceroom is the leading example. The UI may be old style, but its functional and leaderboards are bulletproof. Their ADAC GT leaderboards had over 10x more participants than any of rF2-s esports ones.

- Compensate the focus away from content creation by collaborating more with 3rd party creators more. Be it one-off coding jobs or multi-year content creation deals. Reiza pack was good, but in reality every modder out there, and some who have switched from rF1 to AC instead of rF1 to rF2, should be motivated to work in rF2 interests. Enduracers should be complimenting S397-s content, instead of trying to duplicate it etc.

to keep it short what i would like to see in rF2 in the future:
1) realism still being Nr. 1 priority. rF2 is already TOP in that regard IMO. Keep it that way: Laser scanned tracks and most realistic and verified car physics.
2) historic content DLCs (maybe even priced higher, cause users interested usually are older and have money). like legend cars as Ford GT40, BMW M1 procar ...
3) better VR performance and experience.
4) get online racing to a new level so there are full servers.

Atm I play iRacing main because of the upcoming 24h Nürburgring.
And I have to say now, what I really want to see next is the comp system for rF2 with daily public races.
Plus Ratings, Licenses and all that stuff. PLUS the necessary playerbase to be able to race whenever you want.
The only thing that really bugs me not to be regular active on iRacing are the physics.

Tire physics are not bad on road courses with Traction Control off, and vastly superior to any other sim at the moment.

As for track and air temps thats not as easy as it sounds as creating the algorithms for that are already not well understood to anyone but seasoned tire engineers. Nothing about temps are anything close to linear with a ton of dependencies including chemical formulations of the trire.

Rim structure would require an update to existing mods for the parameters.

Tire physics are not bad on road courses with Traction Control off, and vastly superior to any other sim at the moment.

As for track and air temps thats not as easy as it sounds as creating the algorithms for that are already not well understood to anyone but seasoned tire engineers. Nothing about temps are anything close to linear with a ton of dependencies including chemical formulations of the trire.

Rim structure would require an update to existing mods for the parameters.

Wishlist you say?
I have a few.
Firstly I would like to have the VR experience improved so there is no stuttering while racing or flickering screen while loading.
Secondly, the offline game with AI and safety cars working properly, more strategy options (there are quite a few of us offline players out here)
Thirdly, get the graphics performance across the board to a better state, I know I've only got a 1070 card but I should be able to race without all this graphic lag.
Lastly, please fix the bugs that cause the game to lose focus and freeze. This is where the graphics stops but the ffb and sound keep going and is unrecoverable except through Ctrl-alt-del and reset. After ALL THIS TIME you'd think THAT would have been fixed.

So, as far as wish lists go, I'd like all that by Christmas thanks @Mr.Claus.

1 - AI.
2 - Online racing unification. What this means and or implies I don't know, but you get the idea. Lots of empty servers, no bueno.

Click to expand...

AI settings are just good enough to be usable with quality mods, but unless you're wiling to sacrifice CPU performance there isn't much left for improvement. Possibly a BOP like weights added to various cars when mixing them. The competitive characteristics are somewhat controlled by how the modders have set them up.

As for online the reason you see so many empty servers is the majority of them are set up by folks who carelessly "troll" for other competitors. Few of them state the car mod name, and many have some custom version of cars not downloadable from Steam. A precious few have websites that are organized into a league. The new UI could help a bit with that, and even for those without websites they could use this forum (as a few have) to organize online activity. Online racing takes a bit of effort and common sense and its obvious most of the multiplayer server instances are launched by folks lacking one or the other of those attributes.